Tips, News, and Tutorials on Friend or Follow

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Friend or Follow

Due to changes in Twitter’s Terms of Service, we’ve been asked by Twitter to remove our bulk un/follow feature. We know it’s a bummer, but we’re committed to being a good partner with Twitter and making sure our users have access to tools that follow Twitter’s Terms of Service.

To help our users quickly process their accounts without the aid of the bulk un/follow feature, we’ve created a feature we call “quick un/follow.” It’s accessible to our pro users via the list view. See the animation below for how it works.

When you link a Twitter account to Friend or Follow you are requested to grant Friend or Follow certain permissions. Specifically the Twitter authorization screen says:

This application will be able to:

Read Tweets from your timeline.

See who you follow, and follow new people.

Update your profile.

Post Tweets for you.

Of particular concern are the bottom two permissions granting Friend or Follow the ability to “Update your profile” and “Post Tweets for you.” Friend or Follow is a contact management application so it stands to reason that we shouldn’t need the ability to update your profile or post tweets for you. In fact we do neither of these things. However, Twitter only provides 3 API permission levels:

Read

Read, Write

Read, Write, and Direct Messages

Friend or Follow requires the “Read, Write” permission level in order to provide “Follow” and “Unfollow” buttons, as following and unfollowing are consider “Write” operations. Unfortunately the “Read, Write” permission level includes all other “Write” operations, including updating your profile and tweeting. Fortunately it excludes access to “Direct Messages.”

Some Twitter services make automatic posts to your timeline. We think that sucks, and we have never, and never will post or update your profile on your behalf.

Please consider this our official promise to you: We Never Tweet On Your Behalf.

Update 3/6/2012:

Some folks have asked, “why do you need these permissions now? Your old site didn’t need these permissions.”

Our old site used the Twitter 1.0 API (which is now retired). The 1.0 API did not require that users authenticate to view follower and following data. This is why you could simply type in your username and get results. With the new 1.1 API we have to authenticate with Twitter before we can pull any data.

The “Follow” and “Unfollow” buttons on the old site used a service called Twitter @Anywhere, which Twitter has also retired. That service required “Read, Write” access like our current site. If you used the “Sign in with Twitter” feature to follow and unfollow on our old site, at some point, you granted Friend or Follow “Read, Write” access during the authentication process.

So, what’s changed? Everyone must authenticate with Twitter to use Friend or Follow. We need “Read, Write” permissions to provide a “Follow” and “Unfollow” button. We feel the ability to follow and unfollow directly from Friend or Follow is a central piece of our functionality. So, we request “Read, Write” permissions.

You may have noticed we’ve made a few changes to our web app. Don’t worry! All of your favorite features are still here, plus a few extras. Here’s a quick run down of what’s new and why we’ve made the changes.

The New Login System

The biggest change is our new login system. We know a lot of people will miss our old no-login required approach, but Twitter has made changes to their API that require all API calls be authenticated. This has forced us to create a login system. But there’s a wonderful silver-lining. The new login system provides much better privacy. It also gives you the ability to manage multiple accounts from Friend or Follow, not just Twitter accounts, but Instagram and Tumblr accounts as well!

To make managing logins on multiple websites easier, we recommend using 1Password. It’s an excellent piece of software. We use it daily and love it!

Friend or Follow is FREE!

Our old site was free to use, and so is our new site! No change there. Creating a Friend or Follow account is FREE, and it includes all of the features of our old site, plus a few extra! We do have optional upgraded pro plans available.

What About Veteran Gold Members?

If you are a veteran Friend or Follow Gold member, you already have an account on our new site. All you need to do to access your Gold account is set your password. To do that, just head over to the “Forgot Password” page, type in your email (be sure to use the email you signed up for Gold with), and we’ll send you instructions on how to set your password. Email us if you have any trouble.

Good News for Gold Members!

You’ll also be happy to hear that instead of only being able to manage one Twitter account with your Gold account, you can now manage up to three! For the same price! And your Gold account features work on Tumblr and Instagram accounts as well.

If you currently have more than one Gold account with us, you may want to consolidate your accounts into one. Just email us at support@friendorfollow.com and we’ll do that for you.

New Platinum and Diamond Plans

All of our users can link up to three social media accounts to Friend or Follow. If you have more than three accounts, we’ve created two new plans that offer unlimited linked accounts with under 75k followers.

The 75k Follower Limit

One other side-affect of Twitter’s new API changes, is they’ve limited the amount of API calls that can be made in a 15 minute block. This means we can only pull results for users with less than 75 thousand followers before we have to queue up special processes to get the larger result sets. Due to this we’ll be offering special add on packages for large accounts. Please stay tuned for more details on that!

Hope You Like It!

We’ve put a lot of hard work into the new site, and we really think you’ll like it! If you have any questions, trouble, or notice any bugs please email us at support@friendorfollow.com, or just click our feedback tab and send us your thoughts.